“Well,” in an undertone from Goritz, “if Gold has no practical uses in this outlandish nook of the world, we can take enough of it away with us to a place where it’s more useful than ornamental.”
“Have a care,” warned Hopkins. “Our heads had better be kept on our shoulders, too. Remember, Goritz, you’ve considerable loot in your pack now. If they give us the third degree, and start in on a customs house search, we may get to another place where—where Gold wouldn’t be worth the handling, because of the heat, or otherwise, or because our immediate necessities were otherwise provided for.”
All this while we were again rapidly moving on, and with each step, while the marvel before us grew larger, plainer, some of its first surprising effectiveness changed. It began to be seen that it was little more than a piled up structure of the communal dwellings which dotted the plain beneath it, but on it a queer aboriginal fancy had stuck plates of gold,—or what seemed to be gold—and that its corners were decorated with upraised standards of gold delineating the patron god, or demon, of the establishment, the Crocodilo-Python. Over it too in whirls and corkscrew spirals spread innumerable folded scrolls and winding figures whose lumpy extremities betokened the heads of snakes. It was not long before we had gained the heart of the city. Everywhere it had been a monotonous series of the tile huts, stuck in tiers, one series over another, such as description and photographs have made so familiar from the Arizona and New Mexico region. There was now a much smaller admixture of the taller people, and the little men and women appeared to be almost the only occupants of the city.
We had come almost underneath the pimple-like excrescence on which the golden habitation sat, like a yellow corolla on the green bulb of a thistle, and we found a space surrounding it of about a thousand feet in width, filled with enclosures holding, to our amazement, large black snakes, the congeners exactly of those held aloft, in the procession we had met, on golden rods. The walls of these enclosures were of tile or rudely baked bricks; some were screened with an open wicker work, which in many instances had become dilapidated or were quite worthless as fences to prevent the egress of the snakes. In the enclosure bushes and weedy herbs flourished, and their occupants hung from the branches of these or torpidly lay in the grass beneath, in repulsive bunches. I admit my unreasonable aversion to snakes, and these extraordinary protected nurseries overcame me with disgust. Hopkins was hardly less disturbed. To the Professor and to Goritz they were manifestly attractive.
“St. Patrick can’t be the patron saint here,” said Hopkins, “and whatever language they speak it pretty certainly is not Irish. I think no one could mistake their brogue for anything heard in Cork or Dublin. As for the snakes, I guess what Bobbie Burns said to the louse will fit them,
‘Ye ugly creepin, blastit wonners,
Detested, shunn’d by saunt and sinners.’”
“Every step we take,” solemnly rejoined the Professor, “discloses new wonders. To me it is quite evident that the trail of the ethnic origins of Tree and Serpent worship crosses the pole!”
“Yes,” shouted Hopkins, “and to me, it’s quite evident that the trail of these reptiles crosses ours. Look out there!”
He pointed ahead and over the road stretched the wriggling bodies of twenty or thirty faintly spotted black snakes, sleek and graceful, their heads raised indifferently in a cool inspection of our approach, and their tongues quivering in defiance.